As omicron variant spreads, China senses vindication over ‘zero covid’ strategy

Before omicron’s detection, Beijing’s steadfast commitment to a policy of eliminating covid-19 had made the country an outlier during a global shift toward gradually opening borders and mitigating the spread of the virus as vaccination rates rose.

Now, as nations reverse gear and reinforce border restrictions, Chinese officials are claiming, with a hint of schadenfreude, that their approach was right all along, brushing aside the idea of drastic changes to combat omicron.

Zhong Nanshan, a leading infectious-disease expert and government adviser, said in an interview with local media that China is unlikely to take significant action while it waits for more test results. An official statement on omicron released by the National Health Commission on Monday declared that China’s approach for preventing a relapse still works.

“The policy of encircling and eliminating covid is an indispensable tool for China to keep the pandemic at bay,” chief epidemiologist of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention Wu Zunyou told a conference organized by financial media outlet Caijing on Sunday.

Wu pointed to a recent CDC study that estimated China had prevented up to 260 million infections and 3 million deaths by refusing to adopt the more flexible approach taken by countries such as the United States and United Kingdom.

Strict quarantine on entry into China and the zero-tolerance policy should stay in place until at least winter or spring, because China cannot afford to “overturn” its past successes by making a mistake, he said.

For some Chinese commentators, being right about covid policy is more than a victory for public health; it’s a question of competing political systems, and omicron only serves to bolster propaganda claims of the Chinese Communist Party’s superiority.

As the idea of living with the virus has become more common in Europe and North America, “Western media have maliciously smeared China’s ‘dynamic zero covid’ policy, believing that the costs of this approach were too high and could not be sustained. This point of view is totally incorrect,” said a commentary in the People’s Daily Overseas Edition, an official party newspaper, on Tuesday.

To be effective, China’s mass lockdowns, swab testing and contact tracing required ensuring public buy-in but “Western countries’ comparative difficulty in implementing quarantine policies, a major setback to epidemic prevention, is fundamentally due to differences in governance systems,” Zhou Xinfa, the article’s author, a scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, wrote.